From Steam, I installed and played Left for Dead 2 (L4D2) for a few hours without any problems.\u00a0 After rebooting after an update, the warning “OS Paged Pool Memory Low” in red appeared in the game, followed shortly by bizarre visuals, halting sound, jerky game play, and ultimately, a lockup or crash.\u00a0 A few days later (and after rebooting) I tried it again, and it was fine.\u00a0 Until I rebooted …<\/p>\n
It seemed that pawing at it like a confused monkey was not solving my problem, so I consulted the Internet, which recommended a curious mixture of unrelated voodoo and homeopathic remedies, and Steam themselves has a page<\/a> that mumbles incoherently about drivers and suggests removing parameters that nobody has.\u00a0 Those few people who have had, and solved this problem, appear to have tried hundreds of things all at once and were clueless as to what fixed the issue.<\/p>\n While making sure drivers are up-to-date is rarely bad advice, it’s unlikely to actually fix anything unless your current drivers happen to be buggy.<\/p>\n So, what’s happening, and how does one fix it?<\/p>\n XP has two memory pools, paged and non-paged, and without going into too much technical detail, paged memory can use disk space to expand its total pool (“virtual memory.”)\u00a0 XP uses heuristics at boot time to determine how much memory to dedicate to the non-paged and paged pools.<\/p>\n Specifically, XP calculates a limit for the paged pool based on how much address space that other resources, like page table entries, want.\u00a0 With a lot of RAM and a reasonable amount of swap, XP can still apparently get it wrong.\u00a0 On the plus side, it can be tweaked manually to solve the issue.<\/p>\n in the registry has all kinds of nifty knobs, and the most important one is “PagedPoolSize.”<\/p>\n Note:\u00a0 before doing this, make sure you have a reasonable amount of physical ram and that virtual memory (My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Performance->Virtual Memory) is set either to automatic, or at least a gig or two or twice physical ram size.<\/p>\n PagedPoolSize is almost undoubtedly set to “0,” which means XP will automatically determine the limits.\u00a0 Setting this to “0xFFFFFFFF” means “set this as high as possible,” which is a dynamic value, but based on your amount of physical RAM rather than every other knob in the system.\u00a0 As a troubleshooting step, it’s reasonable to start here — reboot, then try out L4D2.<\/p>\n If it works, you can back this number down a bit:\u00a0 some testing has shown that 256M is sufficient to play without problems (“0x10000000” hex, or “268435456” decimal) but your mileage may vary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From Steam, I installed and played Left for Dead 2 (L4D2) for a few hours without any problems.\u00a0 After rebooting after an update, the warning “OS Paged Pool Memory Low” in red appeared in the game, followed shortly by bizarre visuals, halting sound, jerky game play, and ultimately, a lockup \u2026 Continue reading HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\\ufeffCurrentControlSet\\Control\\Session Manager\\Memory Management\r\n<\/pre>\n